...where I have root and the fare is liberally seasoned with pith and vinegar.
| The Digital Hausfrau ...where I have root and the fare is liberally seasoned with pith and vinegar. |
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One day, I'll tell you the story of my grandparents' version of eenie meenie miney moe. Let's just say that there's no tiger in it. But that's not what this post is about. First, this:
That was for the googlers. All three of them.
This is the story of my upgrade to the new Macintosh system 10.4, code name Tiger. It was, shall we say, not smooth. Now, let me offer the caveat that I was working from a friend's, um, backup disk, but let me also say that said friend is a former Mac Genius, and I have no doubt in his ability to create a perfectly funtional backup disk.
So, the upgrade comes with three installation options...a basic upgrade, Archive and Install (preserves user settings), and erase your whole fucking hard drive and start from scratch. I backed up my drive. Twice. That was good. And I did the easiest option, the upgrade.
And so my troubles began.
I don't know if it was Tiger's efforts to index my drive that slowed everything down or what, but my machine slowed to a crawl. I crashed more times in two days than in the previous two years. And I called Apple. A lot.
I'm cutting out a lot in the middle here, kind of folding my anecdotal map, but all you need to know is that I ended up erasing and installing, which would have been a whole lot easier if not for the fact that Carbon Copy Cloner, which worked fine in 10.3.9, doesn't fucking work in 10.4, and if not for the fact that I'd backed up to a USB 2.0 drive, which won't boot my fucking machine, and if not for the fact that I'd hosed my firewire drive during the installation, and if not for the fact that my previous copy of Disk Warrior (now replaced via FedEx) wouldn't boot the new fucking system, either. And I couldn't use my lovely bluetooth mouse to do all of this! I had to use the kids' piece of shit round blue imac mouse! The horror! The horror!
So, finally, all is well, but then, get this: I've been cuting a movie for my Brownies since September and, if you make the movie with iMovie 5 and system 10.3 and QuickTime 6.5.2,w which I had been, when you go to open in 10.4 with Quicktime 7.0 in the system, it doesn't fucking work! Choppy playback, impossible to use. Garbage. I ended up partitioning the firewire drive, installing 10.3 back on it, and now I have to boot from there every time I want to make a movie, as even new movies in system 10.4 are not fucking working!
Oh, and the whole reason I went to Tiger was to do the multi-user av chats, and I keep getting this bogus "insufficient bandwidth message," and I can't fucking chat at fucking all!
I trust that, eventually, upgrades will address all of this but, at the moment, I am as unhappy with Apple as ever. Except their phone people. I'm not hating them.
Lessons learned: 1. System Freeze! No software upgrades or changes until the current project is put to bed. 2. No more x.0 upgrades. Talk to me when we're at x.3 or so, and the wrinkles have been taken care of. Somehow, apparently, in my lust for the multi-user chat, i confused myself with a goddamn guinea pig.
My faith in the karmic goodness of the universe has been validated. I've won the Mac Lotto. Get this:
Last week, I had to take my imac (800 mhz, 17") in for service. For no good reason, it had gone black overnight. I schlepped it to the mall, secure in my pre-paid AppleCare contract. They diagnosed the problem as my motherboard but, miracle of miracles, my hard drive (which I'd backed up about 2 weeks before, but data files only) was intact. So, computer problem, and a hassle, but no file-eating tragedy.
It was supposed to be ready in about 3 days.
So three days later, I called to ask about it, and my new motherboard hadn't come in. And I asked day after day and, day after day, my motherboard hadn't come in. And it wasn't just my motherboard. It was also something called an "inverter." I don't know what it is, but you need it. Bad.
Yesterday, I talked to the "Genius In Charge." (I want this to be *my* job title aorund here!) He told me that, if my part didn't come in today, they would replace my machine. I was kind of bummed, because that I've been using the crappy old slot-loading imac that I set up for Emily all week, and I hate it, and I thought that this new machine meant waiting for a refurb to get there, but no! He meant relacing it WITH A NEW MACHINE.
I am on my way to the mall at 3:00 to pick up my BRAND NEW G5 17" imac!! With a 120% faster processor and my files loaded on it already!!
I am paying for a RAM bump, bluetooth, and the biggest, best new AppleCare contract they'll sell me.
Steve Jobs, I love you.
I can't even say it out loud; it's that good and I'm that hopeful. But do me a favor, please, and when you next chat with your Higher Power of Preference, mention that you'd appreciate it if S/He could please hook me up, just this one time.
I'll report in the next day or three.
This is my favorite thing on the internet this week. This month. Maybe ever. I can't tell you which part I love best...is it Steve Jobs' long hair and bow tie? Is it the crowd so obviously pleased to be able to play chess on their new computers? Is it how primitive it all seems now?
I'm not sure, but I think it's just the crowd's wild reaction at the end, the same reaction that the audience still gives Steve Jobs at every MacWorld and developers' conference.
We Mac people do love our machines.
If you want to see more, here is a great story about the event.
Compare and contrast these entirely hypothetical scenarios:
The Analog Hausfrau's daughter comes to her and says "I heard a song I really like at the end of Now You See It on the Disney Channel. It's called 'Do You Believe in Magic.'" The Analog Hausfrau gets in the car, drives to Strawberries, and buys her daughter a new cd.
Faced with the same situation, however, the Digital Hausfrau, on the other hand, finds and downloads the song online, realizes that it is not, in fact, the version by the Lovin' Spoonful that her daughter wants, but some hideous bubblegum remake, googles some stuff to find the name of the teenybopper who's recorded it, finds a site with an .asf file, downloads that, downloads and installs Audio Hijack, hijacks the file, imports the resulting .aiff file into iTunes, converts it to an .mp3 file, and burns the girl a disk.
A piece about moms who blog went out to NBC News affiliates today, highlighting dotmoms, where you all know that you can find me on the 4th and the 18th of each month.
If you watch carefully, you can see an entire corner of my most recent post go by!
It's a pain, I know. Comment registration is turned off for the moment, until we work out the kinks. Post away.
My site will not talk you through the one-time registration. You have to do it here.
Again, sorry for the hassle, but I can't read one more word about online poker.
I don't like the stuff in a can (yes, I've tasted it, but I don't admit to that very often), and the spam comments here have been driving me nuts.
Thanks to Lisa, who upgraded me to MT3, commenters will now be asked to go through a very tiny one-time-only registration process.
Sorry for the inconvenience, but it beats deleting and rebuilding all the goddamn time.
Apparently, I want to be Betsy when I grow up. First, dotmoms (look for me there next ont he 18th), and now I've joined at BlogExplosion, looking for a little more traffic.
I love you guys, but we could use some new blood. So be nice to the new kids.
It occurred to me last night that, at the moment, all three of my immediate nuclear (perhaps in the radioactive, not necessarily the intact, sense) family members are simultaneously away in places that they got to, and will have to return from, by airplane. My dad is in Las Vegas, and my mom and Lisa are in Switzerland. This makes me vaguely uncomfortable. Thank you very much, Mr. bin Laden.
Mom, if you see this, screw the chocolate. I know what I want from Geneva. Check some of these out, by the way. I especially like the "Swiss Flame," a combination knife and crack lighter.
You know what I love? I love technology in movies. I love how, on one hand, things are wildly over-advanced...as Lisa put it, while watching Independence Day: "I can't get my Mac to interface with a PC, and they're logging into alien systems?!?"...or, on the other hand, it's an old movie, and things are hilariously archaic.
Somehow, I had a few minutes this morning, in between cleaning the playroom and putting in the laundry, to eat my daily bowl of vanilla yogurt and homemade granola (oh, god, that is good!) in front of the kitchen television. As I couldn't stand one more second of watching Katie Couric lick John Mayer's Chuck Taylors, I started flipping, and ended up watching a few minutes of Wargames for the billionth time.
Forget Matthew Broderick or Ally Sheedy, or even Dabney Coleman. The star of that movie is the machinery, which is room-sized, with lots of blinking lights, monochromatic CRT monitors, and funny voices.
It's worth giving it a few minutes, just to compare what a writer's vision of the extreme outer limits of technolgy were in 1984(ish) versus the reality even of today's low end capabilities.
For the past 36 hours, I have been a Digitizing Hausfrau, schlepping piles of cd's from the family room to the office and back down again. Why it took the iPod to move me to do this, I don't know. I should have done it years ago, just to be able to listen while at my computer, but I didn't.
It's been great...three songs off this cd, six off of this one, the one good song off another. It all started going much faster once I found the iTunes feature that lets me query some database for the track names, rather than typing them all in by hand, which I had been doing, as I am a big spacker. Also the iTunes "Smart Playlist" command, which is fabulous, and frees me from adding each and every Melissa Etheridge tune to the list one by one by one.
What's been interesting to me in this process is how very few comlete albums actually made the cut. Here, then, in no order, but tried by the import fire and accompanied by a couple of full Dead shows, is my Desert Island List:
Steve Jobs and I had a lovefest yesterday, even if he didn't know it. And Bill Gates and I continued our never-ending Hausfrau vs. Goliath battle (me vs. his piece of crap OS and everything-except-Office software).
The end result? Me: one. Bill Gates: 0. Steve Jobs: more love.
It all started on Tuesday night. I realized that the new version of iChat AV would now, theoretically, support cross-platform videoconferencing between Mac and Windows users. Just. Like. That. So I called up my mom, who only bought me the iSight in the first place so that she could talk to my kids, and who has been, reasonably, disappointed in the low resolution and lack of sound offered by Yahoo!, our only previous Mac-to-PC option, and we gave it a go.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
There is no Just Like That to it at all. But, with a lot of googling and reading of Apple articles and discussion boards, we did manage to configure our firewalls properly, open a bunch of ports, etc., and, with our computers properly roped and tied and a nay-saying Asanté router tech support rep on the phone, we got it up and running. If anyone's going to give it a try, let me know and I can help you get through it. Like most cross-platfrom communication, it's a gigantic pain in the ass.
Yesterday's other Apple story involves no such drama. My mom, who knows my love of gadgets and who loves me as much as I love my Mac, got me an iPod mini for my birthday. She's the best, my mom. It's green, in case you wondered, and it has a name that I don't love. Knowing that my hard drives are Jerry, Bob, and Phil, and that I don't want to call it Mickey, Billy, or Brent, if you have a thought, feel free to share. At the moment, I'm leaning toward Pigpen.
This thing is the best gizmo, ever. Ever. The interface with iTunes is seamless and perfect. It's light enough to clip on to my underwear while washing dishes and, as Andrew was unkind enough to point out, tunelessly singing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" along to the music that was blasting directly into my ears.
And! It's the music collection of my dreams, all at my fingertips. I have finally started digitizing my favorite songs, and not just off my 10 favorite cd's, but off ALL OF THEM. So far I'm up to the entire December 27, 1977 Grateful Dead show at Winterland. Except for drums and space. Once you're off the hard stuff, it loses its appeal.
I have decided that I am to Apple as Charlton Heston is to sawed-off shotguns: When you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers...
The Kids Jonah finally hosed the play room computer.
If anyone knows of an old, unloved mac (it only needs to run system 8 and have a working cd-rom drive, really) sitting in a closet or basement somewhere, give a holler.
Anyone else doing Orkut? It sucks.
First, no one ever posts. They start a million little communities (think something between a conference and an item, echo people) and then wait for people to fly by and post, which no one ever does. Traffic is shockingly low.
Second, I am not looking for a date.
Third, I am not looking for an online community. I have one already. And it's like my relatives, echo is. I pretty much know what to expect from everybody, and, ever since the inception of the private conferences, no one new really comes along to disrupt the flow. I hate it but I love it, and I'm kind of stuck with it for the long haul.
My orkut thing is not going to last.
Although, interestingly, poking around tonight (anything is better than folding the laundry, really), I found out that Lisa's boyfriend Adam knows someone named Andy Lester (who has a really funny picture posted in his bio) who is the husband of Amy Lester who came through here once and then either deserted us or went back to lurking. Coincidence, stalker, or somewhere in between, I wonder?
Except for the scary violence and invasion of privacy part, I wouldn't mind having a stalker. A friendly and well-meaning one. Who sends me chocolates. Anyone need an object for your obsession? Email me and tell me in 50 words or less why I should let you be my stalker.
Speaking of stalkers (not really, but I didn't have a good segue), does anyone believe for one second that Janet Jackson's wardrobe "malfunctioned"? And did you see the (not work friendly here!) nipple ring?!? Who dresses up like that without wanting to get seen? I mean, I don't wear my fanciest earrings to clean the kitchen, you know? That tit is dressed for company.
My friend C. in California called tonight to relay the following true story. I practically sprained an ankle tripping on the stairs running up here to post it.
So, C. is sitting in her home office today when her fax machine rings. It starts humming, and she looks at what's coming through.
It's a note from her technospacker father, telling her his new email address.
Happy Birthday to the only device I love more than my KitchenAid stand mixer and my Weber gas grill.
I know, I know...shut up about the fucking isight already, Terry. But I have to say it once more:
Oh. My. God. How cool is this thing?
Mine came in the mail yesterday. It took me about 4 minutes to set it up, and that's only because I kept repositioning it.
Over the course of the evening, I broadcasted to my mom, my sister, and my dad. I showed my dad Emily's school picture and a drawing she had done, just like that. I had an entire video chat with Shelly and Josh in California. I saw (and heard!) all three kids, the lights of their Christmas tree, and Shelly's bangs. I met up with my mom again this morning, who said "That coffee looks good!"
It's like a tiny little miracle. I can't wait for my dad to get my grandma in the house so the kids can wave at her.
And the best part is thinking about where all of this is going. Imagine where videoconferencing will be when, in ten or fifteen years, we look back on this and think of it as Pong.
Big news. I was talking last night to my friend Josh, husband of Cori, who hasn't been seen around here lately becasue she's busy tending to tiny little Trixie (see them all here), and he told me that you can use the AV part of ichat av with any dv camera!
Mac genius that he was and ever will be, he's right! I even got it working with Yahoo Messenger! It's really very exciting.
Of course, it did take me about 45 minutes to figure out (reading Apple articles, checking Apple discussion boards, googling, etc.) that the reason I kept seeing a black screen and not an image was because I didn't have the lens open, but whatever.
Now, who wants to hot chat?
I have some shocking news.
I am, as you know, a Nice Jewish Girl. Raised right, I even married a Nice Jewish Boy and now I, in turn, am raising a couple of Nice Jewish Kids. Nonetheless, though it pains me to say it, after all these years, I am going to be involved in an interfaith marriage.
I am not happy about this.
I tried to keep Andrew on the path of goodness, but he was swayed by the forces of evil and turned toward the dark side. I can only hope that, like the Marranos of Torquemada's Spain, he keeps the One True Faith in his heart.
Last night at our monthly meeting of Girl Scout leaders, we played one of those "getting to know you" games. We tossed a ball of yarn around a circle, each holding a bit and saying something about ourselves...
"I am the mother of two sets of twins!" Toss.
"I am an only child!" Toss.
"I am done with my Cristmas shopping!" Toss, to wild applause.
So it gets to me, and wanting to say something mildly interesting and not overly revealing, I said, "I am a blogger. I have my own website."
They all, to a one, looked at me like I was from Mars. "A what?" "What was that word?" "Blog?" "Oh. Interesting."
No, actually, I'm not from Mars, but I do seem to have moved there.
I got email from Lisa just now, reminding me of something I'd seen at the library this week.
Of course, we all are too smart to fall for this, but there's a big PayPal hoax floating around. If you get email asking you to reply with personal information or your credit card number, as Lisa puts it, run away.
Probably by now you've heard that Simon and Garfunkel will be touring this year. Fortunately, all indications are that there will be a stop in Hartford and, given that the Concert in Central Park is one of my "desert island" discs, I am actually excited about going and optimistic about the show itself.
But what I really want to bring to your attention is the tour website. Is this the ugliest, most looks-like-it-was-put-together-by-a-bunch-of-red-assed-babboons piece of crap you've ever seen, or what?
